Historic
Richard Bundy meets the Pereiras, custodians of the most beautiful boat on the Thames
Living with Lilian N
obody who journeys along the Thames in the area of Twickenham and Richmond bridges can have failed to notice the
most elegant of gentleman’s yachts moored quietly against the Surrey bank. She has the classic lines of the great millionaires’ maritime toys of her era, narrow of beam with raked funnel and masts and counter stern; she appears to be built for speed as well as elegance. She is painted white, with varnished woodwork, and with the name LILIAN picked out in blue on her stern. And she looks as if she has a story to tell. She was built in 1916 at the Södra Varvet yard in
Stockholm and, with a length of 30 metres, eight- metre beam and 56 tonne displacement, was the largest motor yacht in Sweden. She was designed by Carl Gustav Pettersson, a man renowned for the beauty of his wooden powerboats, although she was built of steel, and powered by two revolutionary six-cylinder Polar Atlas diesel engines. The new yacht was named Lilian II by its owner, a Copenhagen banker whose name was shortly to become as familiar and notorious in his day as Bernie Madoff’s 80 years later. Not long after the launch of his new boat, Emil Rafael Glückstadt, chairman of the Farmers Bank, the family business he’d headed since 1910 and expanded enormously, was arrested for fraud and false accounting. Some still maintain that he was a scapegoat but, whatever the case, he died on June 23rd 1923 before the verdict could be delivered.
Sandbanks The Farmers Bank sold Lilian II to Herbert Huntly- Gordon, a resident of Sandbanks, Dorset, and a member of the Royal Motor Yacht Club in Poole. He owned Lilian (the II had been dropped) until 1931 and not much is known of his stewardship – not least because attempts to elicit information from RMYC have met with no reply – but the Beken picture on this page was taken during his term of offi ce. In 1931, Lilian became Dahu II under
the ownership of René Bolloré, of Quimper in Brittany. This would be a Bolloré of the eponymous paper-energy-plantations-logistics conglomerate now employing some 30,000 people worldwide, which was founded in Quimpy, principally as a paper mill, in 1822.
24 cywinter 2011 Photo: John Clement
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